As rising CO2 makes the ocean more acidic,
coral is losing the calcium carbonate that forms
its skeleton, pushed out of the only habitat it has
ever known. Syntheco imagines an alternative:
a synthetic ecosystem where coral survives not
in the sea, but in the desert.
Each formation was generated through directed
AI prompting, then refined and curated across
dozens of iterations to build a coherent, believable
world, impossible in reality yet familiar in form.
The project is presented in two parts: an Index of
wide desert scenes, and a Specimens archive
isolating individual formations against white, in the
style of a natural history collection.
Syntheco is less a prediction than a question,
about what we've come to define as natural,
and what we're willing to imagine in its place.
https://syntheco.framer.website/